Nikolai grozny biography

From Grozny to Mariupol: the Chechen Wars & the Future of the North Caucasus

On Friday, November 3rd, the Strauss Center in collaboration with #Connexions will be hosting Dr. Michael Dennis, Strauss Center Faculty Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, as he lays the historical groundwork for geo-political tensions in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, with a specific focus on the North Caucasus. Other co-sponsors include: the Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies, the College of Liberal Arts, the Global Disinformation Lab, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the Department of International Relations and Global Studies.

This discussion will be centered around Dr. Dennis’s experiences with Chechnya, helping to lay some historical groundwork. Then some of the consequences of the Chechen Wars will be broached: the rise of the Kadyrov family, lessons learned by the Russian Army, impacts on the Putin regime’s decision-making in crises, and Chechnya’s role in Ukraine. Finally, Dr. Dennis will answer questions about the future of

BACKGROUND: The “Domino Effect” was a key Russian concern over Chechen calls for independence, or separation as dubbed by Russia, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing beginning of the Russo-Chechen war in 1994. Russia’s concern was that the Chechen model would be replicated all over the North Caucasus, causing Russia lose one of the strategic areas under its control. However, this did not happen. The areas in the North Caucasus near Chechnya remained peaceful and did not get involved in the conflict, as had been the case in the first Caucasian wars in the nineteenth century. But the Nalchik attacks comes in a different context, the circumstances created in the aftermath of the Russian forces’ announcement of having assassinating Chechnya’s legitimate and moderate president, Aslan Maskhadov, on March 9 of this year. His assassination was a significant addition to Russia’s series of mistakes in the North Caucasus. Maskhadov was a key player in the genuine peace-building efforts between Chechnya and Russia that aimed at putting an end to conflict. He was also the maj

Forgotten Nikolasha

Some 20 years ago, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the late Russian military historian Aleksandr Kavtaradze was invited to give a series of talks at a university in New England. The obligatory campus tour took him to the institution’s Memorial Quadrangle, a monument to the Great War. Flanked by a neoclassical dining hall inscribed with the names of such battles as Cambrai, Château Thierry, Ypres and Somme, it features a cenotaph dedicated to former students “who gave their lives that freedom might not perish from the earth.” Kavtaradze stopped and gazed in utter astonishment at the grandiose complex. “In my country we have no such monuments to the First World War,” he muttered sardonically.

Unlike Canada, whose collective memory is seared by the sanguinary confrontation a hundred years ago, in Russia it was “the forgotten war” until very recently. Soviet historians saw the conflict as nothing more than the inevitable suicidal struggle between Europe’s imperialist powers, the necessary prelude to the new, progressive, proletarian order. While its

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